OTD in early British television: 8 December 1937
John Wyver writes: We might celebrate the television of 8 December 1937 for the one and only appearance of the Trapp Family Singers led by George von Trapp. Formed after winning a singing competition in Salzburg the previous year, the siblings and their father were now on a European tour. They would flee Austria in 1938, settle in the United States, and eventually inspire the 1959 Broadway hit The Sound of Music and the spectacularly successfui film six years later.
Just before the family’s 11-minute broadcast on this Wednesday afternoon, there was another 11 minute-long transmission: a ballroom dancing demonstration by Alex Moore and Pat Kilpatrick. It was clearly beginning to feel a bit like the holiday season at Alexandra Palace since the performance by the terpsichorean two that afternoon was apparently Christmas-themed. Not that you would know this from the numbers played: ‘Let’s be sweethearts over again / Will you remember’, ‘The valeta’ and ‘Please pardon us, we’re in love’.
Yet as the anonymous critic for The Listener noted, ‘the lowbrows of dancing were regaled with first a demonstration of plain waltzing, and then with a reminder of the correct steps of the valeta because, as Mr Moore explained, polkas, barn dances, valetas and the like are the sort of thing we shall be expected to perform during the festive season.’ (15 December 1937)
Alex Moore was a celebrated ballroom dancing teacher and adjudicator who had first partnered with Pat Kilpatrick, who became his wife, in 1932. According to Wikipedia, Moore’s ‘Ballroom Dancing is considered to be the ‘Bible’ of International-style ballroom dancing.’ The couple gave a first ballroom dancing lesson just ten days after the Alexandra Palace service went on air in November 1936, and they returned regularly to the studio to offer sophisticated demonstrations of both classic and contemporary moves.
Their flair as dancers and the penny-plain presentation style, with the couple in evening dress set against a bare background and held in a long-shot that pans back and forth with their movements, can be seen in the BBC Television Demonstration Film, shot on 35mm in April 1937 by producer Dallas Bower to provide television showrooms with a morning broadcast to show off working receivers. The header image and the following stills are framegrabs from the film.
Although the programmes were presented as ‘how to’ broadcaasts, the necessary level of attainment was beyond most viewers, but as aspirational viewing they aligned with other strands of AP output, such as demonstrations of bridge and golf lessons, for the middle-class suburban couples who made up much of the small audience of the time.
Of concern to The Listener critic, however, was the setting, which was that illustrated in the Demonstration Film segment also:
That the contrast of white tie and black tails, and the flowing lines of a girl’s skirt, are well suited to the making of pleasant pictures on the television screen we have already seen… but it may be doubted whether Alexandra Palace have chosen altogether the most satisfactory background for these dancing demonstrations. As a general rule, with studio television in its present stage, simplicity is as much a virtue of good backgrounds as it is of good prose, but perhaps last Wednesday simplicity was carried a little too far.
As the photographs show, all we had was a plain floor and a plain grey curved wall. Most of us are familiar with this wall by now. We have seen it before, to take only one example, as a background to a physical training display.
And for that purpose it would have been hard to beat. It conveyed just the right efTect of hygiene and efficiency and did not distract our attention from what was going on. For a dancing demonstration, however, perhaps it is carrying simplicity to excess. Last Wednesday the wall conveyed a suggestion of dancing within the confines of a prison, which did not help the dancers to create that atmosphere of gaiety essential to their success.
All of which is some way from the shiny floor fabulousness of Strictly Come Dancing. Yet Alex Moore was more prescient than he could possibly have known about the potential of television. ‘I venture to suggest,’ he wrote in Radio Times early in 1937, ‘that it will prove to be the means of creating a far greater interest in dancing.’
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